Israel receives body from Gaza after Netanyahu says soldier killed in 2014 to be returned

Israel has retrieved the body of a hostage after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expected the remains of a soldier killed in 2014 to be returned.

The Israeli army said the body was taken away for official identification.

Netanyahu had previously said that Israel would receive the body of soldier Hadar Goldin, who was killed in an ambush by Hamas during the previous conflict in 2014 and whose body has been kept in Gaza since then.

Hamas’s armed wing also announced that it would hand over Hadar Goldin’s body on Sunday.

If the body is confirmed to be that of Lieutenant Goldin, Hamas will have returned all 20 living hostages and 24 of the 28 dead hostages within the scope of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement.

Netanyahu said Lt. Goldin’s family could now give him a Jewish funeral and reiterated his intention to return the bodies of all deceased hostages.

We have brought back 250 people so far. “We will bring them all back,” he said.

“An entire nation is waiting for Hadar to come back to us,” Lieutenant Goldin’s family said Saturday.

The family said in a statement, “We are waiting for official confirmation that Hadar has returned to Israel. We never give up on anyone in this country. We ask everyone to remain calm. It is not over until it is final.” he said.

Lt. Goldin, from Kfar Saba, was the only hostage whose remains were held in Gaza before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that sparked the latest war.

He was killed in action on August 1, 2014, shortly after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began in that year’s war. He was among a group of Israeli soldiers patrolling an agricultural area near Rafah in southern Gaza when he was attacked by a group of Hamas fighters.

The Israeli military determined that Lieutenant Goldin was killed in a firefight along with two other soldiers and his body was dragged into an underground tunnel by Hamas fighters.

The Israeli army used massive firepower to prevent Hamas from taking Lieutenant Goldin hostage. Many Palestinian civilians were killed in the four-day bombardment of Rafah, including after Lieutenant Goldin was pronounced dead.

On Saturday, the Israeli army recovered a body delivered from Gaza. Israeli-Argentinian Lior Rudaeff.

Also on Saturday, two Palestinians lost their lives as a result of Israeli fire in Gaza. The Israeli army said the two men crossed the Israeli-controlled yellow line in Gaza and posed an “immediate threat”.

Israeli military operations have killed at least 241 people since the beginning of the ceasefire, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.

The Israeli military launched an operation in Gaza in response to an October 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel in which Hamas-led gunmen killed nearly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

The health ministry reported that at least 69,169 people have died in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then.